Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/573

Rh this process. The self-unfolding of God culminates in man. For man is the son of God."

Though the author's argument shows wide reading and much acute thinking, he can not be said to have a happy mode of expression, or the power of putting clearly the thought in mind. The reader soon finds himself lost in a maze of contradictions and wandering in a wilderness of words which convey few or no definite ideas. Very little intellectual good would seem to come from discussions of this nature. You begin and end nowhere, with nothing proved or provable. This is not to say that it is not desirable and important to have clearness and definiteness in our fundamental notions of things, but this is hardly to be attained by spinning a logical web out of our inner consciousness, and trying to find its justification in an assumed harmony between the laws of thought and things.

author claims to have tried to answer the silver question by arguments based both upon the truths of financial science and upon the principles which underlie the operation of business. He hopes that in this volume the busy man of affairs may find some scientific points which may hitherto have escaped his attention; the student in finance a portrayal of business ways; and other readers may find their chain of evidence against silver fallacies more firmly made up. He thinks that besides "treating free coinage," sound finance demands a repeal of the present silver law, and nothing less. "Whether it be possible or not to frame a banking and currency act which shall be acceptable where money is scarce and not too objectionable elsewhere, the war against silver theories must be continued until there shall be effectively presented to the strong common sense of the American people the ludicrous spectacle of thousands of men devoting their time and labor to taking silver out of the mines, where it could do no harm, for the purpose of placing it in the Treasury's vaults, whence its monstrous bulk menaces the industries and the general prosperity of the country." In his succeeding chapters the author discusses the evolution of money, trades, and finance; the movements of prices; India and her silver rupee; prices, wages, and labor-saving machinery; the debtor class and foreign exchange; foreign exchange under normal and under abnormal conditions; the views of representative advocates of silver; ultimate redemption; the old volume-of-money theory; the present silver and currency law; international conferences, and bimetallism.

is a text-book designed to supplement laboratory work, and such books as are mainly confined to the enumeration of facts, by supplying that knowledge of principles and laws which is needed to bind chemical facts together in the mind of the student. The author assumes that users of this book will have a fair knowledge of the chemical properties of substances, and have access to a teacher. "For this reason," it is stated in the preface, "references have frequently been made to matters somewhat outside the subject under discussion, for the purpose of stimulating the more inquiring student, without, at the same time, perplexing those less so. . . . As far as possible, all very debatable matter has been omitted, and it is for this reason, for example, that the account of the theories of solution has been made very short."

of the most thorough and scientific of treatises on microscopy is here presented in an English dress. The translation comprises the authors' work, Das Mikroskop, except Parts VIII, IX, and X, all copies of which, together with the woodcuts illustrating them, were lost by a fire soon after the sheets were printed. The volume opens with an explanation of the theory of the construction Of the several parts of the microscope, embracing calculations of the paths of rays passing .through the lenses, determinations of the positions of images, of the optical power of instruments, and various other problems. The division of the work on testing